Colour tattoo of Sally and Jack Skellington's split face on a calf, drawn in a bold outlined cartoon style.

Sally and Jack split face on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The design splits a single face down the centre, with Sally on the left showing red hair, a stitched face and one visible button eye, and Jack Skellington on the right with a black skull eye socket, stitched mouth and a black spiky hand reaching up beside him. Bold black outlines define the forms, with flat red, orange and brown fills on the Sally side and grey shading and dark stripes on the Jack side. The image is a close, straight-on photo of the tattoo centred on the lower leg against a dark background.

Neo-trad Calf Sally Jack skellington Skull Stitches Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Gildersleeve Ballroom had been playing the same foxtrot since nine, and by the time the clock above the bar reached eleven, Mrs Pell had stopped pretending she was not counting the repeats. Sally kept her back to the mirrored pillar, one hand tucked under the lace collar of her good cardigan, because the stitches along her jaw had come loose again and she did not want the room to notice. Across the floor, Jack was leaning on the cloakroom hatch, pretending to read a raffle ticket upside down.

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"You could fix that in the ladies'," he said when he finally reached her, not looking at her jaw. "Or you could dance with me before the gramophone man gets tired." She told him the seam would hold if nobody laughed. He said he had never once laughed at a seam in his life, only at the people who wore them badly. She took his hand anyway, the long bony one with its curled fingers, and felt the cool ridge of his knuckles settle against her palm.

They went round once, badly. His legs folded at every turn like a deckchair being put away, and on the third turn one of her button eyes popped free of its thread and rolled under a chair near the bandstand. The music kept going. A waiter in a tailcoat started forward with a napkin, as if a spilt drink might be the worst thing that could happen. Jack bent, retrieved the eye from the parquet, and pressed it back into her face with his thumb, the way a man returns a coin he has found in someone else's coat.

"There," he said. "Now you have one for each half of you." Sally laughed, and the seam held, and the band swung into something slower. In the long mirror behind the bandstand, two dancers turned together on one floor, red hair and grey stripe, neither of them quite leading.